Digital Life reported today that the broadband prices for Singapore are likely to drop and speed to be further increased with competitions from 3.5G and Wireless@SG. The slowest broadband plan (512 kbps) is already less than $30. (It was $50+ in the past.) The article also claims that we will have up to 10 gbps (Gigabits per second) access by 2012.

A good sign. We’ve been paying first world prices for lousy speed and service for what seems like aeons. But, we might want to look beyond the promised speed upgrades.

Honestly, even if you get the recent Starhub 100 mbps plan, you will not see your pages load in less than one second. Why? Because the speed quoted is the maximum speed you can attain, not the required speed they are obliged to serve you. Don’t forget that most of the sites we frequent, including this blog, are hosted on foreign soils. It is not very possible to reach up to those speeds unless you are visiting some local sites.

Take this speed test site for example. Try testing with a Singapore server and another server in say USA. You can truly see the speed difference.

On a side note, today is the last “free” day before school restarts for 2007. Hope this will be another great school year.

And can the anonymous author of this comment please identify yourself? I’ve absolutely no idea who you might be.

P.S.: I’ve heard some feedback that I’ve been writing stuff that’s too technical lately… Well, there isn’t much to say of myself so I turned to other stuff. Perhaps it’s time to change perspective again…

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Here I write about the first interesting stuff of the year, though this might sound a little technical.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Captcha, which is mainly used to tell SPAM bots apart from humans. Recently, SPAM bots have gotten around to downloading said Captcha images and analyse them, therefore rendering them useless.

HTML Encoded Captcha is an ingenious way of handling Captcha. It works by scanning through every single pixel of the Captcha image, getting the colour of that pixel, and then transforming them into HTML in many ways like using tables or div.

I’ve done a quick implementation here.

Pretty ingenious. And cool.